by Siggi Bjarnason ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 14, 2019
A concise and practical, if peripatetic, single-volume cybersecurity manual.
A brief but comprehensive guide to cybersecurity for the technically unsophisticated.
Debut author and cybersecurity professional Bjarnason says that he observed, in his capacity as an information-technology worker, a “severe lack of training” regarding online safety on the part of the “average computer user.” He created this manual to provide an accessible introduction for that sizable and vulnerable class. For a brief volume of well under 200 pages, it covers a broad range of subjects, including what to consider when using shared computers and when to use multiple email accounts, as well as more technical topics, such as the distinction between synchronous or asynchronous encryption. Still, the book is clearly aimed at amateurs; at one point, for instance, the author provides a lucid analysis of the different parts of a URL (“a fancy term for a web address”). At the heart of his strategy is rational caution—a “skeptical mindset” that meticulously vets every situation for potential danger but stops short of paranoia. “Critical thinking skills play a pivotal role in your online safety, as you may have noticed already,” he writes. In short: “If you don’t know what it is, don’t touch it.” Overall, Bjarnason employs an informal and even cheeky style: In the service of demonstrating the power of clickbait, for example, he explains that his book’s subtitle is deceptively sensationalistic: “NSA,” in this case, stands for “network secure architecture,” he says, and “CIA” for the “triad” of “confidentiality, integrity, and availability.” In the end, the author largely delivers what he promises—a useful, sensible primer for the uninitiated on an essential and woefully esoteric subject. That said, the book lacks a clear organizational plan, meandering from subject to subject. It also lingers on subjects of limited practical value; for example, a discussion of threat modeling will be all but useless to Bjarnason’s target audience. His prose, though, is consistently transparent, and his expertise is beyond reproach, as he has decades of experience in the IT industry.
A concise and practical, if peripatetic, single-volume cybersecurity manual.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73330-683-6
Page Count: 187
Publisher: InfoSecHelp
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Share your opinion of this book
More About This Book
PROFILES
by John Carey ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
Share your opinion of this book
More by David Hajdu
BOOK REVIEW
by David Hajdu ; illustrated by John Carey
BOOK REVIEW
by John Carey
BOOK REVIEW
by John Carey
by Lorenzo Carcaterra ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 10, 1995
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
Share your opinion of this book
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.